One of the biggest issues we've identified in the Headwaters, as well as across the basin, is access - keeping and improving what we have, restoring access that's been taken away, and establishing a common-sense set of guidelines to ensure that we have a consistent approach to the public's right to... [ READ MORE... ]

Summer Smallmouth Trip
When : August 1st, 2nd & 3rd
Where : New River Campground in Sparta, NC
http://www.canoeingthenew.com/
Cost: $40 Per Person (Does not include lunch or boat rentals)
Join us the first weekend in August on the New River for some top water Smallie Action. As the days grow... [ READ MORE... ]

We have several new chapter sites and therefore new site administrators that have launched their new.ut.org site within in the last two weeks. I would like to say welcome and we look forward to discussions about using the new sites.

I have been watching that little graph that shows the highs and lows of activity on one or our chapters' social media sites. It can be both fun and frustrating to watch it ebb and flow like financial indicators. The marketing voice inside me is always asking what makes the best post to get the... [ READ MORE... ]

If you haven't checked out the information on the 2013 Annual Members Meeting, take a look. It is going to be a great time in Madison, WI with opportunities to learn and network with other Trout Unlimited members from around the country and your favorite TU National Staff members. We would like to... [ READ MORE... ]

Some suggestions for development based on working on a chapter and a council group...

1. For chapters, add an about button so that chapters can add permanent items like meeting times, places, officers, contacts, web links, etc...... Newbies would find this very helpful.

2. I've found a number of people are very, very confused by the idea of groups. The confusion, I think, stems from calling chapters and councils groups. People don't respond well to mixiing chapters and councils with affinity groups. For them, groups describe a collection of people with similar interests while a chapter (or council) is the TU organization to which one is attached. It would seem that renaming Councils and Chapters as such would help. No need to change funtionality, just terminology. So instead of searching for groups (councils, chapters) by region, they could click a Council button to find theirs or a Chaper button for their chapter.

3. When a member sets up their logon id and profile why can't they be automatically entered into their chapter and council... TU has this info and making the link would be easy.

I managed to get started on the Pemigwasset Chapter site. "About" and "Home" slide show are in OK state. I also put up one "Blog" entry and an Album in "Photos". I tried twice to put up an event on the "Calendar". Both times, it appeared that I was successful, but the event never shows up on the site.

So, for the questions and some comments:

Has anyone managed to create events? Edit: I just spotted the events. They were posted in the "Group" "Pemigewasset - 726", not under the "Calendar of Events". No idea how that came to be. I had not looked at the group before. end edit

In the Photos section, the individual photos can have a Titile and an "Alt Text", but I can't see those being used when viewing the album. How are these supposed to be used? I like that (when viewing a photo) you can magnify/zoom. It was a bit disconcerting the first time I tried that - it first zooms to 100% detail and then fits to the window. With a high-res image, that can be a surprise.

Under site settings, changes to local time zone don't seem to take. Plans to change that?

I found that placing photos in text content was tricky. The style settings are not very descriptive, so it's hard to tell what the photo will look like without some trial and error. Some of the styles crop photos is odd ways too.

Thanks Dave! The Pemigewasset Chapter Site is looking great. I went in and set the time zone info. For now, that will have to be changed internally by me. The events issues have been shared with the development team and I will share the news here when it is compleated.

The photos on your site are great. The alt text on photos is helpful for searching. We are woking on adding a photo portfolio that will help admins with photo storage as part of the next phases.

The good news is that TU has planned updates as we move forward. The more users we get added, the faster the updates will added. We appreciate all the hard work our volunteer leaders contribute to help make these chapter and council sites a strong conservation community building tool.

Our Hokendauqua Chapter site is up and running. For the most part it's as functional as our old website, which we will be losing shortly. I would like to see an area where non members could input questions or comments such as a Guest Book or question and comment form. On the old website we get quite a bit of input from non members with those tools. It is a good outreach tool. Site address: hokendauqua.tu.org. A link to old site on the new one Links page with the tools I mentioned.